How To Make Him Stop: Geographies of Ownership & Perpetration

Abstract

This dissertation examines the fundamental yet disavowed role of anti-Black enslavist legacies in shaping contemporary forms of gender-based violence (GBV) perpetration in the United States. Through contrapuntal analysis of landmark scholarship on domestic abuse perpetration, I argue that abusive men's tactics of surveillance, coercion, and entrapment both mirror and exploit the infrastructure of racialized subjugation inaugurated through chattel slavery. Applying Black feminist frameworks to seminal perpetration theories, I elucidate how Lundy Bancroft's formulation of an "ownership mentality" and Evan Stark's "coercive control" model invoke yet disavow the afterlife of mastery, an abjection reflective of white gender theory's broader refusal to reckon with its imbrication in racial violence. My conceptualization of a "geography of perpetration" illuminates the spatial strategies whereby abusive men harness the enduring prerogatives and tools of masters to ensnare women in personal life. I situate this "master's discourse" within a continuum that links plantation domination to present-day carceral and policing paradigms across disparate arenas of life. Disturbing continuities manifest in police officers' vastly disproportionate rates of intimate partner battering, epitomizing the impunity society grants to masculinity marked as legitimate, which is itself deeply embedded in enslavist notions of mastery. Ultimately, I contend that ending violence against women, first, requires abolition, and, second, that abolitionist efforts to dismantle GBV must confront its roots in the ongoing cultural and material effects of enslavism, as failing to do so risks inadvertently perpetuating the very power structures abolitionists seek to transform. Towards this end, I argue the reparations movement holds potential to catalyze an urgent reckoning with the afterlife of mastery in America as a fundamental force structuring violence against women in America, amongst a host of other types of violence. This research expands understanding of the deep-rooted complicities between gendered and racial violence, contributing to the unfinished struggle for genuine collective liberation.